In fact, I'd apply this standard to myself: If my life's work was attacked this way and I would not fight to protect it, then I would have no life's work. Since you asked, for the last four years I've served as a senior software developer as a contractor for the US Air Force. That portion of my life's work is protecting your sorry ass right now. So Fuck Off.
Who are you to criticize him or say his accomplishments amount to nothing if he refuses to follow your advice, when he's contributed far more to the world than you ever will?
My advice is to defend himself from attack by a company that appears poised to ask a court to enjoin him from distributing Linux. If Linux is enjoined and Linux is his life's work, then what has he accomplished? He made an illegal program that no one can use without breaking the law.
What are you doing to defend Linux from SCO besides spouting at Slashdot? What have you invested in this fight or given to Linus that he owes you anything?
I never claimed Linus owes me anything. He doesn't.
But if McBride is correct (not that I believe this), Linus engaged in patent infringment that and wasted hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of my time because of a false pretense that he was shipping clean code.
Defamation might be hard to prove, because it requires not just false accusations, but knowingly false accusations.
A better countersuit would be good old copyright infringement: SCO has distributed linux in violation of the GPL licence, which requires no "further restrictions" and that the distributor grant to "all third parties" (which includes IBM) a GPL licence to the work "as a whole". The GPL is not compatible with patents enforcement and is not compatible with trade secrets.
SCO is distributing his work (regardless of whether IBM added extra stuff to it) in violation of the GPL licence, which requires them to add no further conditions and give "all third parties" (which includes IBM) a licence under the GPL, which isn't compatible with trade secret retention.
You misunderstand something that is absolutely critical. Novell's press release absolutely DOES NOT prevent SCO from suing Linus personally. The best you should even hope for is that Novell has made it very difficult for SCO to win if both sides are vigorously defended.
And sitting back with your head buried in the sand pretending that you can go on programming cool stuff while a large corporations is attempting to stomp on your life's work is not vigorously defended.
I think this case will permanently damage SCO. But what is also important is that the free and open source communities appear strong so that no other company out there even contemplates this kind of crap. "Peace through strength" if you will.
Do you have a list of which ones they actually own. If it's a handful, they can be compared to the Linux kernel to get an idea of what SCO is thinking. Also, the search for prior art can begin, regardless of whether or not the patents are relevent to Linux.
That is what lawyers are for -- they take the burden of defending your rights so that you can focus on your day-to-day needs. Linux is being defamed, he is being threatened with lawsuits. These are not games for "advocates". This is seriuos business and he needs to emphatically assert his rights so that he can continue to have those rights.
It is becoming clear that SCO is no mere troll. They are not simply posting foolishness on some newsgroup or mailing list. Trolls don't ask a judge to enjoin your life's work. Trolls don't send letters to the Fortune 1000 companies threating potential legal action.
I believe that you should ignore idle threats, and turn the other cheek to hollow threats and minor attacks. People who can do this are noble and wise.
I admire Linux for his attempt to take the high road and ignore this as a minor attack. Unfortunately, it is becoming clear that this is not a minor attack. SCO is threatening the viablity of Linus' life work and his greatest accomplishment. If he will not fight when attacked this way, then he has no life's work or accomplishment.
I keep posting this, but nobody seems to get it. SCO as a **distributor** of the linux kernel has committed copyright infringement UNLESS they have properly licenced all copyrights from which it is derived. If somebody else (IBM or Linus) creates a work which is improperly licenced, but is derived from GPL work, then SCO **STILL** must abide by the GPL in order to distribute a deriviative of the GPL portions.
In order to do that, they must abide by the clause (clause 2b) which requires them to licence "as a whole" to "all third parties" (which certainly includes Linux and IBM) the works which they distribute under the terms of the GPL, assuming they either modify the source (clause 2) or distributed binaries (clause 3). This is not compatible with patent enforcement (vs Linus) or with trade secret protection (vs IBM).
Clause 6 states that no "further restrictions" are allowed. Clause 4 moreover states that any attempt to "otherwise... sublicense or distribute" the work will "terminate your rights under this License".
Finally, Clause 5 states that "by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it", which implies that SCO has accepted the GPL by distributing Linux, which even under SCO's extreme viewpoint is inarguably "based on" GPL works.
Linus should and frankly MUST sue SCO for copyright infringement for distributing a derivitive of his work without a licence. In fact, any other kernel contributor could do the same so long as their original work is included in what SCO has distributed. It does not matter if SCO wilfullly commited copyright infringment (it is still infringement), though it is untenable to call it unwilfull after they began publicly proclaiming to retain rights to elements of Linux.
I am not talking about infringement of SCO owned IP, but infringement **BY** SCO of the linux GPL terms on code that is independently owned by its authors.
The GPL requires SCO, as a DISTRIBUTOR of object code versions or modified source versions on linux, to licence the work as a whole under the GPL. The GPL and trade secrets are not compatible because GPL section 6 forcloses any additional restrictions such as an NDA and the GPL grants the whole world a licence to have the unmodified source. SCO's lawsuit is completely frivolous unless they have not agreed to waive the trade secret status on the unix code that is incorporated into linux. But if they haven't waived it, they have violated the GPL for years by distributing linux (regardless of whether they did so knowingly, though for three months they can't even make this defense). Thus any copyright owner of code in the linux kernel (ie any contributor) should be able to sue SCO for willful and unwillful copyright infringment.
Imagine the soilation of SCO's underwear if Red Hat filed copyright infringement in the US, Alan Cox filed copyright infringement in the UK, Linus Torvalds filed copyright infringement in Finland, SuSE filed copyright infringement in Germany, and so forth. I would think the firm that IBM has retained would probably be very interested in taking such cases on a contingency basis for the very purpose of making this litigation as painful as possible for SCO.
Novell is talking Patent and Copyright rights, SCO is talking "contract" rights.
SCO's reply states: "Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with."
This gives them no possible cause of action against anyone in the Linux community other than organizations that willingly entered into a contract with SCO. Moreover, it means that their entire case here can only be against IBM, for trade secret infringement of code that SCO itself published, which is not going to work. Yet SCO, by trying to claim trade secret protection on elements of the version of linux that they were shipping still violates the GPL clause 6 "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
Would some kernel contributor wake up and sue SCO for copyright infringement, please.
I disagree. It is important to have shared libraries installed only once for security reasons. If eight programs each install a given library separately, then when a bug happens in the library, it can be nearly impossible to even find everything that is affected. Instead of having to update one package, you have to update several.
The solution is to use dynamic linking, but to provide the libraries with the rpm. At install time, if the library is there, you leave it alone (or give the user the choice to upgrade).
Re:MUD's need to innovate
on
Saving MUDs?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
We don't want graphics.
If you exclude the majority of the game playing world, then don't complain when your player base slowly evaporates and nobody wants to subsidize your bandwidth needs. MUDs are dying because of the kind of attitude that doesn't listen to what people want.
A better solution is to make a game in which graphics are optional. They don't have to be cutting edge graphics either. A simple 2D map with tiles for players, NPCs, and objects would bring a whole lot of people in.
It just occurred to me how bizarre it is for somebody advocating using a 1.44MB capacity limited storage media to be questioning the value of smaller file sizes.
Also, your anti-floppy-disk snobbery just kicked up a duststorm of dissent.
So. Complain to Michael Dell -- he started it by simply stating the obvious: floppies aren't worth the cost or the space they take up. They're god awful slow and only have a few somewhat obscure use cases. They need to die.
The original post describes using them as an asynchronous networking device (aka sneaker-net). This use is actively harmful.
XML is verbose, which makes for good readability, but large file sizes. Standards based compression is used to minimize the file size. The savings can be dramatic over the full XML: 5-to-1 tyically, as much as 20-1 in certain cases.
The OO format actually is both archived and compressed, and are obviously influenced by the success of the java archive.jar approach. RPM also uses this approach. You are starting to see more file browsers that can transparently drill down into an archive, treating it just like a directory.
Also, I'm not sure that the statement up the thread that compressed files are completely ruined if one sector of the file media is trashed.
You've got to be kidding. An open office file is a zipped XML archive. This is a big advantage for OO over MS Office. The better solution to your floppy problems is to stop using floppies. It is no longer reasonable to expect students to have PCs that have floppies (it rules out new PCs from vendors like Dell).
You have to play show-and-tell WAY before trial. In a typical civil case, the judge will establish a period of "discovery" during which each side can compel the other to turn over whatever evidence is requested.
The plaintiffs have a burden of proof. At some point they will have to lay out their facts or IBM will file a motion to dismiss and we won't even get to trial.
MUD's need to innovate
on
Saving MUDs?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
There is absolutely no reason why MUDs can't keep going. It just seems like they have been out innovated lately by the commercial world.
The simple truth is that open source MUDs need to start helping one another more and start pooling resources to come up with better 2D and/or 3D graphics. People understand that when you pay a monthly charge to a game like Everquest that you are going to get some really nice eye-candy. Still the lack of a monthly charge is a huge advantage towards free games. All MUDs have to do is offer decent 2D/3D graphics to go with the existing quality storylines. This can be done. Go look at a game called Wyvern to see an example (in 2D).
The obvious thing to do is to develop a large base of graphics tiles and skins and that can be shared across different MUDs that use common APIs.
Java's advantages are not just that it is cross platform. Java has a very large class library and the largest base of enterprise developers. Java is a very nice fully object oriented language. Each of these three features alone makes a Java the right language in many situations.
Consider something like SVG support, which I would contend is a rather typical type of thing to want to extend your browser to do. Given that Batik already implements SVG in Java it is probably much less work to implement SVG in Jazilla than it is in Mozilla. Sure C libraries for SVG might exist, but are they cross-platform? Are they object-oriented, which makes development and maintenance easier?
Slashdot Mirror
Much like yourself I would guess.
In fact, I'd apply this standard to myself: If my life's work was attacked this way and I would not fight to protect it, then I would have no life's work. Since you asked, for the last four years I've served as a senior software developer as a contractor for the US Air Force. That portion of my life's work is protecting your sorry ass right now. So Fuck Off.
Who are you to criticize him or say his accomplishments amount to nothing if he refuses to follow your advice, when he's contributed far more to the world than you ever will?
My advice is to defend himself from attack by a company that appears poised to ask a court to enjoin him from distributing Linux. If Linux is enjoined and Linux is his life's work, then what has he accomplished? He made an illegal program that no one can use without breaking the law.
What are you doing to defend Linux from SCO besides spouting at Slashdot? What have you invested in this fight or given to Linus that he owes you anything?
I never claimed Linus owes me anything. He doesn't.
But if McBride is correct (not that I believe this), Linus engaged in patent infringment that and wasted hundreds, maybe thousands of hours of my time because of a false pretense that he was shipping clean code.
Defamation might be hard to prove, because it requires not just false accusations, but knowingly false accusations.
A better countersuit would be good old copyright infringement: SCO has distributed linux in violation of the GPL licence, which requires no "further restrictions" and that the distributor grant to "all third parties" (which includes IBM) a GPL licence to the work "as a whole". The GPL is not compatible with patents enforcement and is not compatible with trade secrets.
How about for copyright infringement.
SCO is distributing his work (regardless of whether IBM added extra stuff to it) in violation of the GPL licence, which requires them to add no further conditions and give "all third parties" (which includes IBM) a licence under the GPL, which isn't compatible with trade secret retention.
You misunderstand something that is absolutely critical. Novell's press release absolutely DOES NOT prevent SCO from suing Linus personally. The best you should even hope for is that Novell has made it very difficult for SCO to win if both sides are vigorously defended.
And sitting back with your head buried in the sand pretending that you can go on programming cool stuff while a large corporations is attempting to stomp on your life's work is not vigorously defended.
I think this case will permanently damage SCO. But what is also important is that the free and open source communities appear strong so that no other company out there even contemplates this kind of crap. "Peace through strength" if you will.
Do you have a list of which ones they actually own. If it's a handful, they can be compared to the Linux kernel to get an idea of what SCO is thinking. Also, the search for prior art can begin, regardless of whether or not the patents are relevent to Linux.
That is what lawyers are for -- they take the burden of defending your rights so that you can focus on your day-to-day needs. Linux is being defamed, he is being threatened with lawsuits. These are not games for "advocates". This is seriuos business and he needs to emphatically assert his rights so that he can continue to have those rights.
It's called "don't feed the troll."
It is becoming clear that SCO is no mere troll. They are not simply posting foolishness on some newsgroup or mailing list. Trolls don't ask a judge to enjoin your life's work. Trolls don't send letters to the Fortune 1000 companies threating potential legal action.
I believe that you should ignore idle threats, and turn the other cheek to hollow threats and minor attacks. People who can do this are noble and wise.
I admire Linux for his attempt to take the high road and ignore this as a minor attack. Unfortunately, it is becoming clear that this is not a minor attack. SCO is threatening the viablity of Linus' life work and his greatest accomplishment. If he will not fight when attacked this way, then he has no life's work or accomplishment.
I keep posting this, but nobody seems to get it. SCO as a **distributor** of the linux kernel has committed copyright infringement UNLESS they have properly licenced all copyrights from which it is derived. If somebody else (IBM or Linus) creates a work which is improperly licenced, but is derived from GPL work, then SCO **STILL** must abide by the GPL in order to distribute a deriviative of the GPL portions.
... sublicense or distribute" the work will "terminate your rights under this License".
In order to do that, they must abide by the clause (clause 2b) which requires them to licence "as a whole" to "all third parties" (which certainly includes Linux and IBM) the works which they distribute under the terms of the GPL, assuming they either modify the source (clause 2) or distributed binaries (clause 3). This is not compatible with patent enforcement (vs Linus) or with trade secret protection (vs IBM).
Clause 6 states that no "further restrictions" are allowed. Clause 4 moreover states that any attempt to "otherwise
Finally, Clause 5 states that "by modifying or distributing the Program (or any work based on the Program), you indicate your acceptance of this License to do so, and all its terms and conditions for copying, distributing or modifying the Program or works based on it", which implies that SCO has accepted the GPL by distributing Linux, which even under SCO's extreme viewpoint is inarguably "based on" GPL works.
Linus should and frankly MUST sue SCO for copyright infringement for distributing a derivitive of his work without a licence. In fact, any other kernel contributor could do the same so long as their original work is included in what SCO has distributed. It does not matter if SCO wilfullly commited copyright infringment (it is still infringement), though it is untenable to call it unwilfull after they began publicly proclaiming to retain rights to elements of Linux.
I am not talking about infringement of SCO owned IP, but infringement **BY** SCO of the linux GPL terms on code that is independently owned by its authors.
The GPL requires SCO, as a DISTRIBUTOR of object code versions or modified source versions on linux, to licence the work as a whole under the GPL. The GPL and trade secrets are not compatible because GPL section 6 forcloses any additional restrictions such as an NDA and the GPL grants the whole world a licence to have the unmodified source. SCO's lawsuit is completely frivolous unless they have not agreed to waive the trade secret status on the unix code that is incorporated into linux. But if they haven't waived it, they have violated the GPL for years by distributing linux (regardless of whether they did so knowingly, though for three months they can't even make this defense). Thus any copyright owner of code in the linux kernel (ie any contributor) should be able to sue SCO for willful and unwillful copyright infringment.
Imagine the soilation of SCO's underwear if Red Hat filed copyright infringement in the US, Alan Cox filed copyright infringement in the UK, Linus Torvalds filed copyright infringement in Finland, SuSE filed copyright infringement in Germany, and so forth. I would think the firm that IBM has retained would probably be very interested in taking such cases on a contingency basis for the very purpose of making this litigation as painful as possible for SCO.
If all they have is a trade secret claim then
1) The secret is out because SCO itself published it as part of their distribution of linux
2) SCO's attempt to retain trade secret protection on parts of linux that they publish violates the GPL
And now its at 6.95, -1.76, -20.21% on heavy volume.
Ouch to SCO. You reap what you sow.
Novell is talking Patent and Copyright rights, SCO is talking "contract" rights.
SCO's reply states: "Copyrights and patents are protection against strangers. Contracts are what you use against parties you have relationships with."
This gives them no possible cause of action against anyone in the Linux community other than organizations that willingly entered into a contract with SCO. Moreover, it means that their entire case here can only be against IBM, for trade secret infringement of code that SCO itself published, which is not going to work. Yet SCO, by trying to claim trade secret protection on elements of the version of linux that they were shipping still violates the GPL clause 6 "You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein."
Would some kernel contributor wake up and sue SCO for copyright infringement, please.
I disagree. It is important to have shared libraries installed only once for security reasons. If eight programs each install a given library separately, then when a bug happens in the library, it can be nearly impossible to even find everything that is affected. Instead of having to update one package, you have to update several.
The solution is to use dynamic linking, but to provide the libraries with the rpm. At install time, if the library is there, you leave it alone (or give the user the choice to upgrade).
We don't want graphics.
If you exclude the majority of the game playing world, then don't complain when your player base slowly evaporates and nobody wants to subsidize your bandwidth needs. MUDs are dying because of the kind of attitude that doesn't listen to what people want.
A better solution is to make a game in which graphics are optional. They don't have to be cutting edge graphics either. A simple 2D map with tiles for players, NPCs, and objects would bring a whole lot of people in.
It just occurred to me how bizarre it is for somebody advocating using a 1.44MB capacity limited storage media to be questioning the value of smaller file sizes.
Also, your anti-floppy-disk snobbery just kicked up a duststorm of dissent.
So. Complain to Michael Dell -- he started it by simply stating the obvious: floppies aren't worth the cost or the space they take up. They're god awful slow and only have a few somewhat obscure use cases. They need to die.
The original post describes using them as an asynchronous networking device (aka sneaker-net). This use is actively harmful.
XML is verbose, which makes for good readability, but large file sizes. Standards based compression is used to minimize the file size. The savings can be dramatic over the full XML: 5-to-1 tyically, as much as 20-1 in certain cases.
.jar approach. RPM also uses this approach. You are starting to see more file browsers that can transparently drill down into an archive, treating it just like a directory.
The OO format actually is both archived and compressed, and are obviously influenced by the success of the java archive
Also, I'm not sure that the statement up the thread that compressed files are completely ruined if one sector of the file media is trashed.
Even the language I use to post this reply is a standard.
That is an off-colour remark.
English is absolutely not defined by a standard, even after the fact, let alone in advance.
I suggest internet connectivity as a replacement for floppies. I think USB keychain drives would also work.
You've got to be kidding. An open office file is a zipped XML archive. This is a big advantage for OO over MS Office. The better solution to your floppy problems is to stop using floppies. It is no longer reasonable to expect students to have PCs that have floppies (it rules out new PCs from vendors like Dell).
You have to play show-and-tell WAY before trial. In a typical civil case, the judge will establish a period of "discovery" during which each side can compel the other to turn over whatever evidence is requested.
The plaintiffs have a burden of proof. At some point they will have to lay out their facts or IBM will file a motion to dismiss and we won't even get to trial.
There is absolutely no reason why MUDs can't keep going. It just seems like they have been out innovated lately by the commercial world.
The simple truth is that open source MUDs need to start helping one another more and start pooling resources to come up with better 2D and/or 3D graphics. People understand that when you pay a monthly charge to a game like Everquest that you are going to get some really nice eye-candy. Still the lack of a monthly charge is a huge advantage towards free games. All MUDs have to do is offer decent 2D/3D graphics to go with the existing quality storylines. This can be done. Go look at a game called Wyvern to see an example (in 2D).
The obvious thing to do is to develop a large base of graphics tiles and skins and that can be shared across different MUDs that use common APIs.
Java's advantages are not just that it is cross platform. Java has a very large class library and the largest base of enterprise developers. Java is a very nice fully object oriented language. Each of these three features alone makes a Java the right language in many situations.
Consider something like SVG support, which I would contend is a rather typical type of thing to want to extend your browser to do. Given that Batik already implements SVG in Java it is probably much less work to implement SVG in Jazilla than it is in Mozilla. Sure C libraries for SVG might exist, but are they cross-platform? Are they object-oriented, which makes development and maintenance easier?